The Democratic party should have woken up as to how flawed a candidate Clinton was once non-Democratic party member and ageing socialist Bernie Sanders emerged as an existential threat to her candidacy.

The Clintons – so renowned for supposed political nous – seemed to completely miss that they represented the ultimate insiders and political establishment in an era of outsiders and anti-establishment. If the Clintons really cared about their political party and their country, they should have understood that Hillary was the wrong candidate for the times and stood aside.

Hillary Clinton has been a polarising and unpopular figure in American politics for decades. I was never excited by her candidacy. I never believed Americans would vote for her – until Donald Trump became her opponent.

A bloviating idiot, a misogynistic fool, a racist, narcissistic reality TV star without a singular achievement to his name? Surely Americans would back a former secretary of state over him – even if she was Hillary Clinton.

How the hell did the Republican party – the party of Reagan’s “Morning in America”, of George HW Bush’s “1000 points of light”, of George W Bush’s compassionate conservationism, and the party of religious evangelicals – how did this party get behind such an utterly awful human being?

The Republican party leadership is largely to blame – they created and fed their party base with promises of lower taxes, balanced budgets and smaller government, and then for years delivered the opposite. They relied on the outrage media (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh) during the Clinton and Obama years to fuel anger – until that anger grew beyond their reach.

And let’s not forget the media. They are now clearly part of the elite – well and truly. Not one major newspaper endorsed Trump. Their readers – if people are still reading newspapers – didn’t care about their endorsements.

And American television networks – from the earliest days of the Republican primaries – have amplified and uncritically analysed Trump’s every tweet, insult and fact-free assertion. They treated Trump’s behaviour and Clinton’s record as equivalent. The media followed the personality and not the policy, and in doing so, they gave birth to America’s first megalomaniac, celebrity president.

As Trump’s electoral college numbers grew on election day, the share markets went into free fall. Sadly the economic impact of that downturn doesn’t fall solely on Wall Street, but it would be good if it did. The banks have never worn the consequences of their greed and destruction: the banks left the mortgage holders and middle class to suffer as they took the bailouts and the benefits of being too big too fail.

Meanwhile the political leadership on both sides pushed free trade and the “new economy” for years without understanding that the new economy sounds scary, and for lots of people, it is scary as their jobs disappear.

This is hardly a new phenomenon – in 1992, Ross Perot labelled Nafta the “giant sucking sound to the south” that would draw manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

Billy Joel’s Allentown and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA sang the psalms of this disempowerment. (Who thought Billy Joel would one day be seen as a politically prophetic voice?)

Yes, the polls were wrong. Here's why | Mona Chalabi

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In this campaign, Donald Trump said China and Mexico were stealing American manufacturing jobs and he was going to steal them back. That Trump’s pledges were without detail and beyond the power of the American president was pointless – he was just relentless in repeating what the political elite had ignored: Americans were losing the chance to earn a living.

And for all the talk of a “rigged” election – well, it came close. FBI director James Comey deserves special mention, as do the Russians for trying to influence the election. However, the margin of Trump’s victory and his results in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania shows that the entire blame for this result cannot be sheeted home to these interventions.

It is often said that the voters don’t get it wrong.

Did they? Can we blame them for giving into fear, hate and division?

Should we mock them for electing the biggest joke to occupy the Oval Office?

No.

The American voters got their diagnosis of the problems right.

But their solution – Donald Trump – it’s hard to see anything right about that.